


The Last Man

by doctorweber



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Blizzards & Snowstorms, Hallucinations, Post-In Your Heart Shall Burn, Talking To Dead People, The Abandoned Mineshaft Outside of Town
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 11:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14401482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorweber/pseuds/doctorweber
Summary: The inquisitor has a much needed conversation with her very dead father.





	The Last Man

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own anything Dragon Age related.  
> EDITED: May 13th, 2018.  
> EDITED: May 15, 2018.

“...A light he was to no one but himself  
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,  
A quiet light, and then not even that…”   
\-- Robert Frost, An Old Man’s Winter Night

Oske awoke to the blinding pain of her broken leg. Screaming into the darkness of the mineshaft, and echo answered her. The wind above her howled like an angry beast, scratching to be let inside. A dead man lay to the right of her, eyes wide and cold. His hand still gripped a sword that would never swing again. A tattered cloak fluttered in the wind like a trapped bird. 

The tears ran hot and dark down her face as she took stock of her surroundings. White snow and slate grey walls. And the precious darkness. The last hour had been too much to stand, even for a stoic warmage like herself. The village of Haven had most definitely fallen, buried beneath the snow and the rubble of the mountain. An ancient, insane magister bayed for her blood and wished for her hand. She was so close to being dragon chow. Her people left her to die the death of a martyr on the mountaintop. She had been weighed on the scales and found wanting. The cold bit like a viper and she writhed in the snow, tossing and turning.

“Why are you crying, pumpkin?” her father said in a bemused voice. “I think I’m dying,” she said to her father, looking up at the ceiling of the mine. It had long fallen into disuse, and she wondered if it would collapse on her while she lay prone and terrified in the snow. Her leg numbed and her breath evened out. She was going into blessed shock. “Do you know why a wolf’s paws are bigger than a dog’s?” he asked, crouching beside her fallen body, twisting a snowflake around in his hand. He liked to show off his magic like that, to her mother. Once he froze a lake for her mother’s nameday, and the two skated. Twirling effortlessly on the water like two swans, gliding and flowing with a grace Oske could only imagine. “No,” she turned her face to the snow and wept with the weight of the world. The pain lit up her leg and her cry cut through the mine. “Yes, you do,” he said, patient and proud, his long ears flicking in disdain. “I read it somewhere in a book,” she said, and he cut her off. “I told you when you were eight years old. Answer me.” She was blank to the answer, but even still, it came to her. 

“Their paws are like, like snowshoes. They have webbed toes that spread over the snow. Dogs get weighed down in the snowpack, but wolves can walk over them easily,” she said quickly, chest heaving and hands shaking. The exertion of speaking was almost too much to comprehend. She was wasting precious energy talking to him, when she could be escaping her predicament. Her body shook from the pain and the cold and the roar of the blizzard. Wolves could walk over the snow where a dog would be buried. She did not see the relevance, but her dead father wanted her to know it, so it must have been important.

“There you go, pumpkin. Do you know what this is called?” He gestured vaguely at himself. Her tears ran down her face, and for a moment, she could not see him. “They call it a post-bereavement hallucination. You’re not real,” she said. He laughed quickly, and corrected her. “Enchanters at the shemlen circles call it ‘last man syndrome’. When one is alone and dying, they see things they’re not supposed to, so tell me, if I am not here, what do you know to be true?” he asked, putting out the last flickering torch in the snow. With it, the hope in her chest spluttered out. “You’ve been dead some ten years and I’m dying,” she said. He clucked his tongue in disapproval. “Sarcasm won’t keep you alive, da’len.”

“Alright, my leg is injured and I can’t walk. I’m in what appears to be a mineshaft, and you’re dead, so I’m hallucinating. I don’t have my staff, I don’t have a mundane weapon. I don’t even have snow boots.” She finished her monologue and looked at her father expectantly. He was shorter than she remembered. “Well, then, solve the problems as they come. First, the boots,” he said with an air of decisiveness, before glancing to her right. “Dead men don’t need boots,” he said, nodding towards the dead man to her right. “I know him,” she said, flinching,” his name was Howard. He was kind to me.” A silence followed as she summoned up her courage. Her father said nothing as she rolled over to the dead templar and pulled his boots off his feet. “Take his cloak, too,” her father said, running his fingers through her hair, as she retched her dinner in the snow. She reached for his sword, but her father shook his head. “It will weigh you down in the snow, pumpkin,” he said. 

Her next order of business was fixing her broken leg. With limited mana and chilled breath she summoned up her dullen magic. It came slower than usual, like mercury on a fire, on account of the biting cold. Yet it came all the same. Blue sparks shot from her fingertips to her leg and through it, magic mending what it could. Not much, but enough to walk, she hoped. Her father went through the dead man’s pockets, rifling around with the light, expert touch of a thief. 

Corypheus, the mad magister, hell-bent on conquering the world had tried to kill her on this night. She saw his world at Redcliffe, and did not wish to live in it. She would stop him if she could. But first, she had to survive tonight. “Why do I need his boots, papa, they’re not snow boots,” she asked. “They’ll have to do. You’ll need his boots for the climb,” he said, flicking his knife into the stone wall of the mineshaft and carving something into it. She could not see what he had carved, and for one mad second, she thought he might be real. “I can’t catch up, they’re gone already. It’s no use.” She wept again, tears scoring her cheeks. “They are many and you are one. They cannot go unseen in those numbers,” her father said, coming over to her and rubbing the tears from her cheeks. “Look for fires, look for footprints, hear for the howl of the wolves. They’ll be following them,” he said. “Why,” she asked, tilting her head in her confusion. “It’s been a hard winter, and the wolves will follow any meal, pumpkin.” She slid to the wall, using it to steady herself, and slowly made her way into an upright position. The exertion took some of her power, but she dug deep and found she could go on. She could leave Haven. 

“What’s it like to die?” she asked her father, scared of his answer. “It’s like slipping into a dream, pumpkin. You’ll be dead before you know it.” His answer comforted her, but she knew she would not die tonight. She survived an avalanche, a mad god, and a dragon. She could survive the cold. That thought comforted her, too. Her anchor flared back to life and her heart was ready to leave. “Fix this,” her father said in a no-nonsense tone. “You need to fix this.” He glanced toward the darkness of the tunnel, and he turned to go, before stopping abruptly. 

“I have a question, pumpkin. Do you still pray to my gods?” he asked, blinking in and out of existence, like a trick of the light. “I haven’t prayed since you died,” she wept, back against the tunnel. “Maybe you should start,” he said, and disappeared into the snow from whence he came.


End file.
